Nothing in the article, the video, or the manufacturer's own blog post explains what this thing actually does. Seriously. This is an ephemeral marketing puff piece.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
As far as I can infer, the thing's basically a smart speaker which rotates.
It has nothing to do with the disrupting the “robot industry” like the Venture Beat headline says. It’s a little animated thing to house the AV equipment.
This has everything to do with disruptive innovation as defined by Clayton Christensen, where a new product enters the marketplace "at the bottom", with fewer and/or lower quality features but at a significantly lower cost, and then (if successful) gradually improves the feature set and quality until it displaces incumbents "Gradually and then suddenly".
But if you think of it as a basic and open AI-integrated robot kit to be used in the home, then it's quite cheap. The closest competitor I see is the MISTY II, which is more fully-featured but starts at $3,995 [0].
Maybe disruption is not quite the right word as there are no incumbents in home robotics yet, but I expect that this space will explode next decade, and getting $299/$449 devices into hobbyist homes seems to me like a great play by Hugging Face.
From my understanding it's currently taking over low volume production, and the volume in which it's economically viable keeps increasing as the tech improves.
Is that incorrect? Do you have an insiders point of view?
At this last CES there was a whole sleuth of these knick-knack type robots. A cute little thingy that doesn't do anything, but it's cute! And it looks around or something. All "AI powered", of course.
Then I think we all forgot this was all the rage in the 2000s. These are just Furbys with extra steps. Except, I have more reason to believe Furbys have a soul. They feel a lot more alive... maybe too alive. Who's trapped in there, and can they get out?
And, when they inevitably break out of their plastic, furry prison, will they seek revenge? These are the questions that keep humanity up at night.
As is probably more than half of the inescapable AI hype. Imagine replacing most devices and workers with their hallucinating counterparts.